Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computer architecture, Shared Memory Architecture (SMA) refers to a design where the graphics chip does not have its own dedicated memory, and instead shares the main system RAM with the CPU and other components. This design is used with many integrated graphics solutions to red ...Full description
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computer architecture, Shared Memory Architecture (SMA) refers to a design where the graphics chip does not have its own dedicated memory, and instead shares the main system RAM with the CPU and other components. This design is used with many integrated graphics solutions to reduce the cost and complexity of the motherboard design, as no additional memory chips are required on the board. There is usually some mechanism (via the BIOS or a jumper setting) to select the amount of system memory to use for graphics, which means that the graphics system can be tailored to only use as much RAM as is actually required, leaving the rest free for applications. A side effect of this is that when some RAM is allocated for graphics, it becomes effectively unavailable for anything else, so an example computer with 512 MiB RAM set up with 64MiB graphics RAM will appear to the operating system and user to only have 448 MiB RAM installed.